Bertie's eyes were glowing with earnestness, and his whole manner was as eager as it had before been inert. Cecil was dumb from contending emotions, love, pride, and doubt, all at war; yet a small voice in her heart kept repeating "At last!"
"You must have known my wishes ever since we parted at Montreal," pleaded Bertie. ("I was by no means so certain," thought Cecil.) "I could not speak then; your father will, perhaps, think I oughtn't to now. Yet, at least I can say honestly, will you marry me, my dearest little Cecil?"
At the asseveration, "I can say honestly," a sudden illumination came over her face, as if every cloud had been instantaneously swept away.
Persons conversant with such subjects maintain that the plain words, "I will," are generally first used by the bride in church, when she promises to worship M. or N. with her body. No doubt, Bertie was answered somehow; but as there are no reporters in Paradise, so happiness requires no chronicler, and we drop the curtain while Cecil becomes engaged to her ideal and only love—a fate sufficiently uncommon in this world of contradictions.
The wind was lulled to a whisper, and a golden sunset was reddening the lake, ere our lovers remembered, with a start, that they had to get home.
"Now comes the rude awakening," cried Du Meresq. "Dinner spoiled, and a very stern expression of paternal opinion to you, my poor Cecil. Very grumpy to me. By Jove, I won't tell him to-night! Here's your half-baked boots. We shall never get them on. Shall I carry you to the boat, and roll your feet in the bear-skin?"
"I feel as if a hundred years had passed since we were last in the canoe," said Cecil, evading this obliging proposal. "But how the lake has calmed itself down; it seems sleeping, and the shore and the islands cast long shadows on it."
"'Tis one of those ambrosial eves
A day of storm so often leaves,"
began Bertie, with his incurable propensity for quoting. "What made you so shy at the station, Cecil? I was obliged to put you in a rage to get you natural again."
"After the pleasing picture you draw of our domestic felicity, I can't think how I ever accepted you."